The Article 29 Data Protection Working Party and individual EU privacy watchdogs will study Facebook's practice for possible rule violations, with regulators in Ireland and the UK for example considering the photo-tagging function on Facebook.
Gérard Lommel of the Working Party is reported as commenting that -
Tags of people on pictures should only happen based on people's prior consent and it can't be activated by default.Facebook, recurrently criticised for volatile privacy policies (and for an apparent willingness to disregard privacy principles through unheralded introduction of new features that are belatedly withdrawn in response to consumer criticism) reportedly explained that -
We launched Tag Suggestions to help people add tags of their friends in photos; something that's currently done more than 100 million times a day. Tag suggestions are only made to people when they add new photos to the site, and only friends are suggested.We might question that defence: just because a large number of consumers (naive or otherwise) do something does not mean that it is right. In March this year Facebook indicated that it planned to provide user addresses and mobile phone numbers to third-party application developers, and might disclose the home addresses and mobile numbers of minors. Such provision might delight application developers but is not legitimate merely because the cash registers jingle.
The Tag Suggestion feature is the default in the accounts of existing Facebook users. Interested in fixing the default? Facebook charmingly points you to its blog, which explains how users can disable the function if they do not want their names to be automatically suggested for other people’s pictures. A better practice would be to ensure that the photo-tagging feature is not the default and that instructions for disablement were clearly identified in each user's control panel, so that people were not forced to scrabble around in the Facebook blog. A express and proactive commitment by Facebook not to independently use face recognition is desirable.
Unsurprisingly, Lommel comments automatic tagging suggestions "can bear a lot of risks for users" and the European data protection watchdogs will "clarify to Facebook that this can't happen like this". Another Working Party member commented that -
We would expect Facebook to be upfront about how people's personal information is being used. The privacy issues that this new software might raise are obvious.Facebook's history raises questions about whether it will indeed be "upfront" and whether it will abide by any commitment in the absence of regulation.
In the United States EPIC has indicated it plans to file a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission over the feature.
